Transcript

Leo Laporte
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This is TWiT, this WEEK in TECH, episode 211 for September 7, 2009, The Dummy Contract. This WEEK in TECH is brought to you by audible.com. Sign up for the Platinum plan and get two free books. Go to audible.com/twit2 and follow audible on Twitter, user ID audible_com. And by GoToMeeting, do more and travel less with GoToMeeting, make your next meeting a GoToMeeting instead. For your free 30-day trial, visit gotomeeting.com/twit. And by squarespace.com, the fast and easy way to publish a high-quality website or blog. For a free trial and 10% off your new account, go to squarespace.com/twit.

This is TWiT, this WEEK in TECH, the show that covers all the tech news of the week gone by, well at least the stuff that I think is interesting or maybe that I just happen to notice in passing. Joining us today in studio very glad to have an old colleague, she is young but she’s been with us a long time. Former web producer for Call for Help, TechTV employee now…

Nicole Lee
Intern.

Leo Laporte
Intern, you’re an intern?

Nicole Lee
I was an intern.

Leo Laporte
You never got paid?

Nicole Lee
I got paid, but not very much.

Leo Laporte
25 a day.

Nicole Lee
Enough to pay for lunch.

Leo Laporte
Your lunch and a bus fare.

Nicole Lee
Yes.

Leo Laporte
And now an actual employee at CNET. What’s your title at CNET?

Leo Laporte
Techblog. And I – actually even when you’re not on the show, I’m – a shameful secret, I’m going to reveal here, I always go to your link blog because you basically linked all the best stories of the week so I just copy everything there.

Dwight Silverman
I do it for you Leo.

Leo Laporte
Thank you. I knew you did. Also here John C. Dvorak, couldn’t do the show without him at ChannelDvorak. Is that a contract you want me to sign, John, you’re holding up a dummy contract?

John C. Dvorak
I’d have it made if you sign this.

Leo Laporte
You’d own me, baby. Good to have all of you aboard. We’re going to talk about the week’s tech news starting with – I don’t know if you saw yesterday on Google, the flying saucer on the Google. I love those Google doodles that they do. But yesterday’s…

John C. Dvorak
They are doing more – have you noticed, they’re doing more than before?

Leo Laporte
They are.

Nicole Lee
They are.

John C. Dvorak
Yes.

Nicole Lee
I saw the Michael Jackson one, when it was his birthday.

Leo Laporte
They did his shoes.

Nicole Lee
Yes, they did.

Leo Laporte
It was doing like the moonwalk.

Nicole Lee
Yes. Wasn’t that cool?

Leo Laporte
But you know there’s some controversy because Google you know – chooses to honor some things but not other things…

Nicole Lee
That’s true too.

Leo Laporte
People say, well, why aren’t you – I don’t know, I can’t remember what they don’t honor but why – you honor Ramadan but not Martin Luther King’s birthday or whatever it is. But this one was just weird, it was a UFO and it was beaming up the O in Google – in the Google logo and then on the – I think it was a Google blog or it was a Google twit – that was a Google Twitter – twitter.com/google, they had a very cryptic numeric sequence which was obviously encoded if you – twitter.com/google and you go back a little ways you’ll see this, 1.12.12 25.15.21.18, I mean they’re giving it away – they are even giving you the word; the word, thanks. And then they have a link to a Twitpic, which might be a little bit of a hint – no it’s a Twitpic of the Google Doodle.

Dwight Silverman
Of the logo, right.

Leo Laporte
Of the logo.

Nicole Lee
Of the logo.

Dwight Silverman
And that’s just – that’s grade school cryptography that was – it was the letters of the alphabets so that wasn’t much of a challenge.

Nicole Lee
Which is in reference to the all your base are belong to us.

Leo Laporte
Yes, exactly. And finally, after – it took a while because there was a lot of speculation, in fact if you click the link – because always those doodles have a link, it went to – it search to the – the Google search on unexplained phenomenon, it really didn’t – and of course the first item on the unexplained phenomenon was an article about the mysterious Google Doodle and what could it possibly mean, so it wasn’t very helpful.

John C. Dvorak
Some kind of roundabout.

Leo Laporte
It turns out, I don’t know why Google honored this, it is the 20th anniversary of that game.

Nicole Lee
That game with the – all your base are belong to us.

Leo Laporte
All your base are belong to us game.

Nicole Lee
This is so strange.

Dwight Silverman
At least…

John C. Dvorak
I like it.

Nicole Lee
It’s kind of nerdy in a way right.

Dwight Silverman
I don’t know if it’s true.

John C. Dvorak
They should do a daily thing.

Nicole Lee
Yes.

Leo Laporte
A daily mystery.

Nicole Lee
A daily mystery, ooh!

Leo Laporte
Yes. Go ahead Dwight.

Dwight Silverman
I just – I don’t know if I – Google hadn’t confirmed this, the article that pulls the Zero Wing theory comes out of the Telegraph in U.K. and they don’t talk to anybody who says, yes that’s what it was.

Leo Laporte
It has to be though. But it has to be.

Nicole Lee
What else could it be?

Leo Laporte
September 5, 1989, Zero Wing comes out. The Twitter – it has to be. But what I like is the playfulness here and it’s not tied to any big holiday, I mean come on who wants to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Zero Wing after all. I would like to see…

Dwight Silverman
But I love all your base – if that’s what it is I’m glad they did it but until they say, I’m skeptical.

Leo Laporte
It’s a very – so you don’t think it’s that?

Dwight Silverman
Well it maybe that, but I want to see…

Nicole Lee
I don’t think they should say it, they should leave us like – they should leave it a mystery.

Leo Laporte
Never tell us.

Nicole Lee
Never tell us.

Dwight Silverman
Like the end of The Sopranos.

Nicole Lee
Right.

Leo Laporte
Yes, what did – what the hell was that all about? Yes.

John C. Dvorak
They didn’t know themselves, they just finished it.

Leo Laporte
So we’re done.

Nicole Lee
We’re done.

Leo Laporte
You figure it out, whatever you think. And now Matt Weiner who is a writer at [ph] nuzzles (6:55) last couple of seasons is writing that show Mad Men, which I love but pretty much every scene in Mad Men ends like the last scene in The Sopranos. Somebody wonders off…

John C. Dvorak
In every episode.

Leo Laporte
No, every scene. The show is the most cryptic show in history.

John C. Dvorak
No, it has – [ph] cassowary (7:10) yes.

Leo Laporte
It is cryptic. It’s like, huh. I think it must be a style that I just did.

John C. Dvorak
I’m not seeing this season’s Mad Men as good as the past.

Leo Laporte
Oh I like it; I’m a Mad Men fan.

John C. Dvorak
I mean I like it because it like the imagery and the references but…

Leo Laporte
The period is what I like, they do such detail.

Nicole Lee
The style is also very…

Leo Laporte
They’ve reproduced the periods with such detail.

John C. Dvorak
Yes, but I think their story is going nowhere this year.

Leo Laporte
That’s the style.

Dwight Silverman
Well, it usually starts out slow. Mad Men starts out kind of – you’re always going where is this going and then by about mid-season it picks up. Last year, a lot of people had the same complaint.

Nicole Lee
Yes, where did you first heart of Mad Men, Leo?

John C. Dvorak
Well, hopefully.

Leo Laporte
I don’t know why.

Nicole Lee
I actually heard from Twitter…

Leo Laporte
Well, everything.

Nicole Lee
Like every one of all my friends were talking about it.

Leo Laporte
Everything now, the first time you hear about – well maybe just you and me Nicole but…

Nicole Lee
Oh I guess.

Leo Laporte
The first thing I hear about anything is on Twitter. In fact if I want to know what’s going on in the world, I use to be – I would wake up to my clock radio set to KCBS, the news channel in San Francisco, and that’s how – I would, you know.

Nicole Lee
I would…

Leo Laporte
In fact 1010 WINS use to say that, remember in New York City they’d say, give us 20 minutes we’ll give you the world. Now I just got a Twitter and see what’s happening.

Nicole Lee
I would never have heard of Mad Men otherwise because it’s on AMC which I’ve never watch.

Leo Laporte
Right. Never watch.

Nicole Lee
And so…

Leo Laporte
Probably…

John C. Dvorak
Because HBO didn’t pick it up.

Nicole Lee
Yes, that’s what it was.

Leo Laporte
Which was nuts; HBO made a big mistake.

Dwight Silverman
Yes, they walked away from it.

Leo Laporte
Yes.

Nicole Lee
Yes.

John C. Dvorak
Which is [indiscernible] (8:31) because they got nothing.

Leo Laporte
They got True Blood, that’s good.

John C. Dvorak
I don’t know.

Leo Laporte
Don’t you like vamps?

John C. Dvorak
One of these things every season and that’s [indiscernible] (8:37).

Dwight Silverman
I just think the bug me about it was they got no power adaptors, they took all devices, and I kept going get the adaptors, get the adaptors.

Leo Laporte
If you’re watching carefully, you know – it’s funny the video that’s on YouTube is from Channel 6abc, they make two and a half minutes out of this 31-second video. But you see the guard walking around, typical Apple Store, guards walking around, it’s quite. Guys throw a brick through the window. It must have been planned, I mean they were good – oh man they make it a whole story out of this, this is ridiculous.

Nicole Lee
Local news.

Leo Laporte
Local news, exclusive Apple Store theft.

John C. Dvorak
As if there’s any other robberies in the world.

Leo Laporte
Look at this, well because they’ve got this great video, right.

Nicole Lee
Right.

Dwight Silverman
And the reporter gets more and more breathless and outrageous as it goes on, I mean by the end of it he’s yelling, this is what they did.

Nicole Lee
The way he tells this is like a law and order heist or something.

[Video]

Dwight Silverman
Exclusive. Ooh look at that. They are good. Get the adaptors, get the adaptors.

Dwight Silverman
Get the adaptors.

John C. Dvorak
They don’t realize that the adaptor cost more than the machines.

Leo Laporte
Oh good job.

John C. Dvorak
Whoa, brother.

Nicole Lee
Cool.

Leo Laporte
Look at his…

John C. Dvorak
Hey what’s happened?

Leo Laporte
He’s hiking up his pants. What were you doing dude? What were you doing?

John C. Dvorak
So apparently the security guard was on his pee break.

Nicole Lee
Oh no.

Leo Laporte
They timed it really well.

John C. Dvorak
Really they must have scoped out his [indiscernible] (10:57) consistent.

Leo Laporte
Either that or he’s in on the deal.

Nicole Lee
Either or that always goes on a pee like at the exact same time.

Leo Laporte
Yes, he’s like you know – that was well done.

Nicole Lee
Yes.

Leo Laporte
And they were covered – they must have known there were cameras in there.

Nicole Lee
Oh for sure.

John C. Dvorak
I think it would have been better they’re wearing Nixon masks. That’s still my favorite outfit.

Leo Laporte
That’s a good outfit.

Nicole Lee
Yes, that’s a good one.

Leo Laporte
When you’re going to steal something wear a Nixon mask.

John C. Dvorak
So is there any news this week at all, seem kind of dull this week.

Nicole Lee
I guess it’s only big news if you’re a company and you relied on it.

Leo Laporte
But…

John C. Dvorak
Companies have this all the time.

Nicole Lee
Yes, I guess so.

Leo Laporte
It’s kind of stupid if you’re a company and you…

Nicole Lee
That’s true too.

Leo Laporte
You’ve outsourced all – do companies do that? They say, oh we don’t need to use email, we just use Gmail. We don’t have to have a mail server, let’s just run Gmail.

Nicole Lee
Was it only Gmail? Did Google Docs work fine? Did…

Leo Laporte
Google Docs worked fine, everything else work fine.

Nicole Lee
Okay, okay.

Leo Laporte
Google, I thought, handled it pretty well. They have a status page and they were very quick to put on the status page, we know it’s down, we’re working on it, we should have it up in the couple hours and then…

Nicole Lee
It does make me wonder how wide is Gmail use, like how many users do Gmail actually have.

Leo Laporte
It’s the number, I think it’s 149 million users.

Nicole Lee
Okay.

Leo Laporte
It’s the number two or three after Yahoo!...

John C. Dvorak
Three.

Leo Laporte
Number three after Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Google.

Nicole Lee
Three, see it’s not as big as Yahoo! or Hotmail, right?

John C. Dvorak
Yahoo! is one.

Nicole Lee
Yahoo! is one.

Leo Laporte
And yet if Yahoo! went down for 100 minutes, would it be a bigger story.

Nicole Lee
Nobody would talk about it. It would be like…

John C. Dvorak
That’s a good point. I wonder if this even happened.

Leo Laporte
Earlier this week, Yahoo! Mail went down for five days, no one noticed.

Dwight Silverman
Because the geeks use Gmail.

Nicole Lee
That’s a problem. That’s the…

Leo Laporte
Oh that’s an interesting question. I wonder what the percentage of Gmail users on Twitter is compared to the rest of the world.

Nicole Lee
Yes, that’s what I am thinking.

John C. Dvorak
Yes, they probably more likely to be on Gmail than they’re on Yahoo!

Nicole Lee
Yes.

Leo Laporte
And Hotmail is right out.

John C. Dvorak
Because it’s [indiscernible] (14:05) only.

Leo Laporte
No geek – self respecting geek would be, you know, sexygeek123@hotmail.com, that’s just not a good title, that’s not.

Dwight Silverman
Unless that you’re a spammy mail address…

Leo Laporte
Right.

Nicole Lee
Right.

Dwight Silverman
Where dump all your spam.

Leo Laporte
Did I mention that Microsoft Word can be sold again, did I mention that?

John C. Dvorak
I got one. Here’s a story that’s kind of amusing.

Nicole Lee
Okay.

John C. Dvorak
Microsoft calling on thousands to host their own Windows 7 parties.

Nicole Lee
What?

Leo Laporte
This is so ridiculous. Go to houseparty.com. And apparently Microsoft isn’t the only company that uses – this is a service, houseparty.com, other groups like the Mexican Avocado Growers, and use houseparty.com to create – to – I don’t know why you would do this, maybe there is this whole subculture of people holding house parties for commercial product releases…

Nicole Lee
Ford Taurus’ game day house party?

Leo Laporte
Ford Taurus game day house party sponsored by Ford, so here it is Windows 7 launch party global sponsored by Microsoft, apply now and you go in here and you sign up and look at the prize, you could win a $750 computer.

John C. Dvorak
It sucks. I’m going to – I want like a grand and I’ll throw a party and do what they should do, Microsoft if they had any brains which apparently they don’t anymore, they would say look, you throw a party and you get a list you know, 40 people or whatever and you should document the party and send us the invoice and we’ll send you a 30, 40 bucks a head.

Leo Laporte
Well, they do send the host a copy of Windows.

John C. Dvorak
Big deal. Invite a Costco, for a lesser money you know it’s cost you to throw a party.

Leo Laporte
Well, I wonder, I mean what is the requirement. Do you have to have a certain number of people show up?

Nicole Lee
Yes, can you have – invite like your mom and that be a party?

Leo Laporte
Yes.

Nicole Lee
I don’t know what’s a party.

Leo Laporte
I’m having my mom over and we are going to have a party.

John C. Dvorak
I’m going to have a party in my pants.

Leo Laporte
Yes, exactly. You’ll be assisted by House Party, the world’s leading party organizer, pick a theme then upload photos and videos, chat with other hosts, blog your experience and download fun favors from your personal House Party page, no purchase necessary, is subject in all respects to complete official rules available at houseparty.com, it’s kind of a sweepstakes but it sounds like you don’t really have to do anything. You could just have a party – you could, you could have a party in your pants. It doesn’t say…

John C. Dvorak
As long as you don’t send them the video.

Leo Laporte
It doesn’t say that you have to, you know, how to add her, during the entry period go to the host section, drawing, they are going to have a drawing which means one person gets a $750 computer, oh no, 64 people are potential prize winners from all the eligible entrees.

John C. Dvorak
But what is a $750 computer?

Nicole Lee
Yes, tell us what it is? Don’t just say it is a PC that’s worth $750.

John C. Dvorak
Is it a running Adam chip and UNIX?

Leo Laporte
That’s probably a piece of crap, yes. Publicity, general conditions, it doesn’t say you actually have to have anybody show up at the party.

John C. Dvorak
I had a party but nobody showed up.

Nicole Lee
No.

Leo Laporte
Okay, all host will receive one limited signature edition Windows 7 Ultimate, one deck of playing cards with the Windows 7 desktop design.

Leo Laporte
You get 10 tote bags, also included in the USA party bags, one package of streamers for decoration, one package of balloons for decoration, one table top center piece – I’m having a party. I want to do this. We’ll have it right here. Oh, we’ll have it right here, the TWiT cottage, one package of Windows 7 napkins.

John C. Dvorak
Oh yes, now you are convincing me.

Leo Laporte
Oh, I’m joining. I’m doing this. We are going to have a party right here.

Nicole Lee
Oh wow.

Dwight Silverman
There is a coffee shop in Houston that’s kind of gotten a lot of notoriety for being kind of the Web 2.0 central coffee grounds, they’ve actually been written up in a few stories about businesses using Twitter, and the guy who runs it has a applied for – to do one of these and he wants to make a big deal out of it so, their businesses are actually seriously but yes, I want to do it just to get the napkins.

John C. Dvorak
The napkins?

Leo Laporte
Windows 7 napkins

John C. Dvorak
I was thinking you got a dinner party…

Leo Laporte
I’m signing up right now. I can use Facebook connected to it; that simplifies, I’ve read and agreed to the terms and conditions; I’m reading and agreeing to the terms and conditions and now I guess it’s probably going to spam my Facebook account right now.

John C. Dvorak
Yes.

Dwight Silverman
You can’t sign up with your Windows Live account.

Leo Laporte
Isn’t that interesting?

Nicole Lee
It should, right?

Dwight Silverman
Yes.

Leo Laporte
It doesn’t though.

Dwight Silverman
Yes.

Leo Laporte
All events from houseparty.com will be – houseparty.com will be able to create and modify Facebook events on your behalf without your approval each time. Sure why not.

John C. Dvorak
Do you have to be a Facebook person to do this?

Leo Laporte
No, it’s just, allow RSVPs; it’s just a quick and easy to do it. Let me see if – other ways to do it, Facebook…

John C. Dvorak
I don’t like the Windows 7 party.

Leo Laporte
This is it. I’m getting the Windows 7 party.

John C. Dvorak
I’m getting one too because I need those napkins.

Leo Laporte
I want streamers, I want balloons.

Dwight Silverman
I just got to say that they have special themes they want you to do.

Leo Laporte
Oh!

Dwight Silverman
And you could choose from one of four; photo palooza; media mania; setting up with ease, that’s mine, and family friendly fun.

Nicole Lee
I don’t understand.

Leo Laporte
Oh, here is the party address, I’m going to put in my address here; cannot ship to a PO Box, okay, I’ll put in this studio address, oh, this is so exciting, when should we have – I guess we should do it on TWiT, we’ll do it a TWiT for that week.

Dwight Silverman
Yes, you have to do it sometime between October 22nd and 29th, so it would have to be…

Leo Laporte
Oh, yes, that would be great.

Dwight Silverman
Sunday for that.

Leo Laporte
Yes, that’ll be perfect.

Nicole Lee
Oh, God!

Leo Laporte
It’s a very special TWiT. All right, we are going to – I’m going to finish this, the sign up you too can, in a minute, we’ll be back before we do all of that, I want to pause briefly to mention my good friends at squarespace.com, the great place to set up your website, your blog, your photo site, your Windows House Party site, go to square – you know, that’s where I’m going to set up mine. I’m going to do it on squarespace.com.

Go to squarespace.com/twit right now, you can try it free, see how you like it, you are going to – I think you are going to be blown away by how easy it is to set up a site and how great the sites look; they have incredible templates to start with but then using Ajax simple drag and drop to - you know you could resize columns, you can move it around, great social media integration, there is an iPhone app, incredible statistics, you are just going to love it; import all your data from Movable Type, WordPress, TypePad or Blogger, and export it so you are not trapped; it’s not a [indiscernible] (21:11) no, 14 days free, no credit card necessary when you go to squarespace.com/twit, and I’m going to set up my Windows House Party site, so next week I’ll tell you where my Windows House Party site is on Squarespace.

Squarespace.com/twit; by the way if you decide to sign for Squarespace you get 10% off; this is great software, great hosting and is design to handle any amount of traffic, you can get dug, slash dotted, twitted, don’t matter, Squarespace can handle it; squarespace.com/twit.

And I’m going to – I’ll come up – I guess so I’ll call it Leo’shouseparty.squarespace.com or something like that. And I’ll have my house party on Squarespace.

Do you have a blog, a personal blog, Nicole?

Nicole Lee
Yes, I do.

Leo Laporte
What’s your personal blog?

Nicole Lee
It’s not a Squarespace blog.

Leo Laporte
What?

Dwight Silverman
Where is it?

Nicole Lee
Sorry. It’s neekole.com

Leo Laporte
That’s now how you spell Nicole.

Nicole Lee
No, I know. Someone else has…

Leo Laporte
You couldn’t get Nicole.

Nicole Lee
Someone else has that one.

Leo Laporte
Oh, that’s cute site, I like that. What are you using?

Nicole Lee
I just use WordPress.

Leo Laporte
You should try - you should really try Squarespace.

Nicole Lee
That’s the story. WordPress story.

John C. Dvorak
Did you update?

Nicole Lee
There is a – no I haven’t yet.

Leo Laporte
Oh, don’t tell the world that. Don’t tell the world that.

Nicole Lee
No, okay, I didn’t say that.

Leo Laporte
We have all updated

Nicole Lee
I didn’t say that.

Leo Laporte
Yes.

Nicole Lee
I didn’t say that.

Leo Laporte
Man, don’t announce that.

Nicole Lee
I’m sorry.

Lao Laporte
Big deal, in fact Scoble was furious because, well, he hadn’t updated WordPress, he was a couple of versions back, there is a very big bug in WordPress that lets bad guys get in spam your account, create phony administrator account so they can come back later…

Nicole Lee
Yes. It’s a big deal.

Leo Laporte
Really, delete data, trash it, I mean, just, he days I don’t feel safe with WordPress, hackers broke in and took things; he says it feels to him like it did when he was a kid and his house got broken into, and I can – yes, I think that that’s probably his house.

Dwight Silverman
We got Scoble, here is a guy who is a – he works for Rackspace, you know, which is a service that lets you host your website and presumably you can do a, wants you to do backups and he didn’t have a backup or any of his…

Leo Laporte
Oops.

Dwight Silverman
Any of his blogs, which he said he is going to do again but you think Rackspace would have backed him up.

Leo Laporte
Well, I’m not going to throw stones because I’m on SoftLayer and I had EVault which is a backup technique and I had all the stuff, and it just - something had gone wrong, and hadn’t backed up so when a bad guy put a PHP script on my site, I created the hole by the way, foolishly allowed uploads to an open directory, bad mistake, so he uploaded a script which I later found and I have called, and I warn you Dwight, I have it, called C9.PHP.

That was a really interesting script. So if you upload it you could then execute it – it does a lot of very clever things, looks through My S-Q-L for passwords and stuff; so he got in and he deleted a forum site; he deleted a couple of things, he deleted a blog; we had cached, you know, Google cache is a stuff, so we had Google, we were able to get everything back. The forum we were not able to. I had to go back to my last back up which is a couple of weeks old.

But this is bad when this happens, it is really scary.

John C. Dvorak
So where is this person?

Leo Laporte
I don’t know; he sent me a note, he was from, I just can’t remember what country he was from. He didn’t know who I was, he just sent me a note saying, hey, I found a hole in your site and I’ve trashed everything just thought I’d let you know. It was nice of him. So I sent him a note back, so why did you do for? He said, well, you know, I just – because I could. He wasn’t like a bad person.

Nicole Lee
Whoa.

John C. Dvorak
No, he was just totally insane.

Nicole Lee
He [indiscernible] (24:53) your site. He is not a bad person at all.

Leo Laporte
He trashed it pretty good. It was just like somebody walking in your door, throwing the garbage around, you know, kicking over some chairs and leaving.

Nicole Lee
And then calling you later and say, hey I did this to your house, you should probably take better care of it.

Leo Laporte
Exactly.

Nicole Lee
But what kind of person does that?

Leo Laporte
Exactly. He said, it was like saying, hey you left the back window open so I crawled in and trashed your house just to give you a warning.

Nicole Lee
Yes. That doesn’t…

Leo Laporte
I learnt my lesson, but I have the script still which is very interesting. One of these days I kind of thought maybe I’d go through it and show people how hackers work – script kiddie, it’s not hacker obviously.

But 2.8.4, make sure your WordPress is updated. If you use wordpress.com, this is kind of interesting Matt Mullenweg who was a – I believed created WordPress…

Dwight Silverman
Yes, he created it.

Leo Laporte
I’m not – I do not own WordPress, it is an open source project, I’m not responsible for WordPress, my company automatic runs wordpress.com we never had the problem there; it’s kind of interesting; it’s almost; he almost disavowed; he said wordpress.org is an open source project, a lot of people work on it; wordpress.com is safe, so I thought that was kind of an interesting point of view to take on. And I always considered him the, you know the guy who created WordPress so.

Anyway if you haven’t updated, do update, and these things happen all the time although it seems like I get – I update, one of the reasons WordPress is at 2.8.4 is because they do frequent security updates.

Nicole Lee
That’s true. At least they do that.

Leo Laporte
Do you update – I mean do you – you know the new WordPress if you have upgraded 2.8, it’ll say there is a new version and it’s a very one button upgrade.

Nicole Lee
It’s actually very easy to upgrade.

Leo Laporte
It’s so easy to do.

Nicole Lee
You just click one button and it’ll do it for you.

Leo Laporte
Yes.

Nicole Lee
So.

Leo Laporte
You should be doing it.

Nicole Lee
So, you should be doing it.

Leo Laporte
Google has patented its home page.

Nicole Lee
What?

Leo Laporte
What!

John C. Dvorak
What!

Leo Laporte
What!

John C. Dvorak
What.

Leo Laporte
Google’s home page…

John C. Dvorak
Because it’s so patentable.

Leo Laporte
Apparently, well, somebody thinks it is, and filed a patent application in March 2004, it was approved on September 1st; it’s - the patent is for the simplicity of the home page.

John C. Dvorak
Well, then let’s go back into the late ‘90s and take a look at the Yahoo! Page.

Leo Laporte
Which was pretty simple.

John C. Dvorak
As prior art.

Leo Laporte
Graphical user U.S. – United States patent 599372; graphical user interface for display screen of a communications terminal; I love the archaic language they use in this stuff. Claim – the ornamental design for a graphical user interface for a display screen of a commercial terminal as shown and described. Approved.

Now, I got to say you are right. I mean, seems like there’ll be prior art to a simple white page.

Nicole Lee
Yes.

Leo Laporte
It looks like the page ion my novel. I wonder if this has to do with Bing. You think that this…

John C. Dvorak
Well, you know, but Microsoft’s MSN, Live Search was very simple too, so Bing is actually complicated by comparison because it has the big photo, maybe Microsoft can patent the photo.

Leo Laporte
I kind of – no, I have to say I kind of like that photo and then – and you hover the mouse over different parts of it and there little searches and, I kind of like that. It’s their response to the Google Doodle I think. It’s something, you know, so you go that page otherwise you would have no reason to go that page, just use the search bar.

Dwight Silverman
And it changes daily, right, on Bing?

Leo Laporte
Yes. There’s got to be – I think there is going to be a little, maybe a war to get people to go to the page as opposed to just use the search bar because nowadays nobody ever uses the search bar.

Nicole Lee
Right, the little, search field…

Leo Laporte
Right.

Nicole Lee
At the upper right of the…

Leo Laporte
Right. So today, I don’t know what that is, it’s a very close up – looks like an electron microscope photo, but then if you move stuff around, oh, behold, one of the most pervasive life forms on earth, can you guess what it is? Just makes it kind of fun. You want to go there, right.

Dwight Silverman
Leo, you said you don’t think people use the little search bar on the browser?

Leo Laporte
No, I think they do is what I’m saying instead of going to the web page.

Nicole Lee
They do as opposed to – yes.

Leo Laporte
You can now go back and see homepage images and hot spots from the past week with our new homepage archive, however, you need to need to install Microsoft Silverlight to see. Then that’s [ph] ton of a (29:19) gratuitous requirement. Well, if you install Silverlight, maybe we’ll let you see our previous homepage.

Nicole Lee
Do people still use their “I’m Feeling Lucky” button? This seems so…

Dwight Silverman
I use Google toolbar and I’ve started using Safari a lot more and I found that there is no Google toolbar for Safari, but the thing I like in Google toolbar is there is a button for searching just the site you are on at the time which is really useful and I would love to have that button in the little search area on say, Firefox or Safari, that’s one of the most useful buttons I’ve …

Leo Laporte
You know, I just use site: and the site name but that’s a lot of extra typing, that’s all it’s doing as such.

Dwight Silverman
Right, right, it does that for you. I’m lazy.

Nicole Lee
I actually use Google Quick Search the little what do you call that, a utility like you can install the little application, it’s kind of like Quicksilver for the Mac.

Leo Laporte
It was written by Alcor.

Nicole Lee
Oh, yeah.

Leo Laporte
He was the guy who wrote Quicksilver, he now works at Google, and he wrote…

Nicole Lee
So I use Quick Search [indiscernible] (30:25).

Leo Laporte
You like it?

Nicole Lee
I quite like it.

Leo Laporte
It’s basically like Quicksilver, although not quite as feature rich, yet I have a feeling that’s Alcor no longer develops new features on Quicksilver. I think he’s put all of his energies into that. Good. Now I’ve installed while we’ve been talking. I have installed Silverlight. Why not you? Now I can see…

John C. Dvorak
Now she will never run fast again.

Leo Laporte
I know. How many – anybody upgrade to Snow Leopard in the group here?

Dwight Silverman
Yeah.

Leo Laporte
You have. Dwight, now, did you – did you upgrade your Flash?

Dwight Silverman
Yes, yes, I did it the other day, yeah, after I saw that story that there is a – they shipped it with an old version that had a [indiscernible] (31:06).

Nicole Lee
They had downgraded the Flash.

Dwight Silverman
Yeah

Leo Laporte
But that’s the big – I mean it’s not unusual in Apple’s defense. They went Gold just like a week or two after Flash was updated. So I understand why they wouldn’t want to include the new version in the Gold Master because they hadn’t had time to taste it.

But it’s kind of unheard of to downgrade somebody’s stuff to a less secure version, and I tell you.

Nicole Lee
Yeah, that’s really bad.

Leo Laporte
So anybody who is using Snow Leopard after…

Nicole Lee
Was there a reason, like is that – was there like a…

Leo Laporte
Well that – because they – because the exploit was discovered and patched just two weeks before they went to Gold Master.

Nicole Lee
Oh

Leo Laporte
So in Apple – again in Apple’s defense I can see why they might not include it. But it is a little bit bad behavior to downgrade somebody.

Dwight Silverman
And so if they’re replacing the 32-bit in Leopard when you do the upgrade, they might strip out all the plug-ins. But here is something interesting; there is no 64-bit version of Flash, right? And so how are they running a 32-bit version of Flash inside a 64-bit operating system and a 64-bit application?

Leo Laporte
Microsoft has that exact problem with Windows.

Dwight Silverman
Right.

Leo Laporte
If you run 64-bit Windows, you cannot run 64-bit, i.e., if you want Flash.

Dwight Silverman
Right. And you can’t install the 32-bit plug-in for Flash.

Leo Laporte
Right. So you have to – I get this call all the time because it really confuses end-users who – they shouldn’t have to know 32 from 64. But nowadays everybody is selling 64-bit Windows, that's kind of the default pre-installed, and they try to run it in Internet Explorer and Flash won’t install, and they go – I don’t get-what- huh?. What's going on here? So this may be – I don’t know if this is related. I think Apple has figured out a way to run a 32-bit plug-in within a 64-bit browser.

Dwight Silverman
Well they are running a 32-bit colonel in a lot of – on a most of these machines at defaults …

Leo Laporte
That’s the default.

Dwight Silverman
Right.

Leo Laporte
Yeah. What is your – we talked about this last week, and I’ve kind of beaten this dead horse, I’m not going to beat it anymore. But just to add, we haven’t – I haven’t talked to you about this Dwight. What's your…

Dwight Silverman
One more whack at the horse.

Leo Laporte
No, it’s a leopard, not a horse.

Nicole Lee
Snow leopard.

Leo Laporte
I was a little perturbed by the general media and all the Mac media, but even some of the general media like David Pogue and Walt Mossberg – David Pogue said this is a must have upgrade everybody ought to run out and do it. But I thought – and even said anybody who says this is a service-pack is a hater. And I thought, David, you know, I don’t think this is something everybody should run out and upgrade to. And this is just one more reason why it was bad idea to run out and upgrade.

John C. Dvorak
Was he doing a vocal imitation of George Bush?

Leo Laporte
Got to run out, got to install it, must install it.

John C. Dvorak
That’s the other George Bush.

Leo Laporte
Oh, I don’t do George W. Bush. [ph] see guys here the dub (34:00). Do you do a George W. bush?

John C. Dvorak
No.

Leo Laporte
You might Dwight, you are from the same area, the same neck of the woods?

Dwight Silverman
I’m not going to touch that.

John C. Dvorak
Mine would be a version of [ph] Jon Stewarts (34:17).

Leo Laporte
Oh, he did – [ph] Jon Stewart (34:15) does a fantastic George W.

John C. Dvorak
But it just seems like you are either for us or against us kind of thing with a comment like that.

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

John C. Dvorak
Just, I found it very disturbing.

Leo Laporte
And I don’t think it’s – now, this brings us to a story because the New York Times Ombudsmen - they have an [ph] ethicist site (34:35) is this typical papers, does the Chronicle have something like this strike?

John C. Dvorak
I don’t think so, but some papers have had to do it because they are so influential.

Leo Laporte
So the Houston Chronicle doesn’t?

Dwight Silverman
We have a – we had for a while a reader rep, we are now kind of farming out questions to individual editors whose area it falls in…

Leo Laporte
And then you – and then you would publish a story or…

Dwight Silverman
Publish [indiscernible] (35:00).

Leo Laporte
Yeah, so you would publish. If you felt there were a conflict you would publish a story explaining…

Dwight Silverman
He had a blog and we would deal with it often in that blog.

Leo Laporte
See because the New York Times calls it their public editor. I don’t – does this appear in the print edition or is it only online?

John C. Dvorak
I think it’s in the printed issue.

Dwight Silverman
Yeah, it is.

Leo Laporte
So the story is Clark Hoyt, the public editor, the story is he works for the Times too. And apparently there were some complaints that David Pogue who was writing and reviewing Snow Leopard in a glowing fashion by the way happens to also write manuals and has Missing Manual for Snow Leopard coming out soon. And that seems to be a pretty apparent conflict of interest because…

John C. Dvorak
Id’ say.

Leo Laporte
Certainly he has some interest in Snow Leopard being a success…

John C. Dvorak
I don’t have a – you know I don’t have a problem with the conflict of interest thing to a point with the guy who writes books about a topic and he’s really in love with the product, except for the fact that the New York Times, in particular, I mean Pogue, if he was writing for a computer magazine, I - would be so what but New York Times is so incredibly snooty about having these all these ethical check lists that the fact that Pogue gets away with this is amazing to me.

Leo Laporte
He writes, but it creates a tricky ethical terrain no Times journalist is in quite the same position as Pogue, reviewing products and simultaneously writing guides to them. He said he makes more money from the books than from the Times as if that justs…Oh that’s okay then, well alright….

John C. Dvorak
Oh, yeah, okay fine.

Leo Laporte
Okay, then keep doing that.

Pogue and his editors say they talk…

John C. Dvorak
I make more money as a hooker.

Nicole Lee
Oh, no.

Leo Laporte
I make more money selling cocaine but that doesn’t stop me from doing this show every darn Sunday.

John C. Dvorak
Jeez.

Leo Laporte
But Nicole if you want me to hook you up just on the way out, just let me know.

Nicole Lee
Ok

Leo Laport
Pogue and his editors say they talk frequently about how to deal with this varied interests. And the editors praised him as a straight shooter. And that's true. He points out that we was – he says “savaged” Apple’s iMovie ‘08 in his Times blog even as he was writing a Missing Manual for it. Ultimately they decided this is not an issue but they have said in future they probably should say something about it in the article and they also say it’s good the Times addressed the issue now. Windows 7 is being released within a month, Pogue is planning to review it, the Missing Manual is already for sale.

Dwight Silverman
Yeah he also – he actually started the Missing Manual series.

Leo Laporte
Right.

Dwight Silverman
It’s grown into quite an empire. And he also does the – he does Windows 7. I’ve got copies of his stuff here. He does OS X, whenever there is a new one of those, he did Leopard, he’s done a switching to the Mac.

Nicole Lee
Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t a lot of tech-journalists do books on the side?

Leo Laporte
I think you do Dwight, don’t you?

Dwight Silverman
I do. I’ve written two tech books, I’ve done one, a book with Windows – with Larry Magid on Windows Vista and I’ve written one about running Windows on the Mac that deals with virtualization and boot camp – both of those [indiscernible] (38:22).

Nicole Lee
So is the issue here because Pogue is also a reviewer, like he reviews the product and he sells a book about that same product?

Dwight Silverman
Well, see I’m a reviewer too…

Nicole Lee
Yeah, so…

Dwight Silverman
I review them and I also write these books.

Nicole Lee
Right. So, is there a solution?

Dwight Silverman
But the way we’ve dealt with it – the way we’ve dealt with it at the Chronicle and the way that they are dealing with it in this case is their disclosing openly that he writes these books.

Nicole Lee
Right.

Dwight Silverman
I think if you read his stuff, he’s pretty much an Apple fan boy but he is a straight shooter, he’ll lay it out if he doesn’t like them. I do the same thing. You can’t read any of my reviews and say that I’m licking anybody’s boots. And in fact even in the books that I’ve written, I will say when I think that something is not a very good – isn’t executed very well.

Nicole Lee
Right.

Dwight Silverman
So I think so long as you are open about it and you are not, you are being straight about it, let the readers make up their own mind. When we – when we did the columns, when I wrote – whenever I’d write a column about Vista, whenever I would write about virtualization, we would put a disclosure at the bottom that I had written this book. What was funny was that some people thought, oh he is pimping his book at the bottom of his column.

Leo Laporte
It does look like that. It’s not a disclaimer, it’s an ad.

Dwight Silverman
Right. I haven’t made any money off those books but…

John C. Dvorak
Yeah, you should put ‘available at’.

Dwight Silverman
Yeah, in the remainder bin….

Leo Laporte
Disclaimer. But it is – this is something that’s going to come up more and more nowadays because they are – these lines are absolutely blurring.

John C. Dvorak
You know it’s over. Everything is corrupt now, so I wouldn’t worry about it.

Leo Laporte
And I don’t think this is – well, it’s funny because in past days saying “oh, but, no read my reviews, I’ve been critical” wasn’t a defense right? I mean that’s new that that's a defense that well you could read my reviews, you can see I’m independent. I mean I use the same defense. But I don’t – but I, you know, I don’ know, it’s…

John C. Dvorak
Here is what it is. The guy is – I mean Pogue is probably right, he makes more money on his books, he probably makes a fortune on his books. Of course he uses the New York Times to leverage book sales so that can’t be a minor issue.

Nicole Lee
Right.

John C. Dvorak
And the fact that he does that, I think the Times has a complaint that is valid. I mean I don’t think at the same time that they would rather pay Pogue less money but then they pay a regular or full time reporter and get his content for a discount and let him go make money on the side on his own dime.

Leo Laporte
That’s how new media does it.

John C. Dvorak
And I think – yeah, I think exactly that’s what's happening right now.

Leo Laporte
That’s how I do it.

John C. Dvorak
Because these cheap bastards that run these newspapers don’t pay people enough money not to have to do books.

Dwight Silverman
Right.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah.

Nicole Lee
Yeah.

Leo Laporte
David is a good friend, I’ve known him for years, I know he’s ethical.

John C. Dvorak
So here is a deal. So – since we have Dwight here and he’s just told us about his two books [ph] sold (41:16), I’ve got this thing here in front of me.

Leo Laporte
It’s a contract.

John C. Dvorak
It’s a dummy contract. So I have to ask Dwight – do you sign the dummy contract?

Dwight Silverman
[Indiscernible] (41:24).

John C. Dvorak
That’s enough, never mind.

Leo Laporte
What is a dummy contract, may be we should define terms, what is that?

Nicole Lee
Yeah, what is it?

John C. Dvorak
The dummy contract is what – it’s the contract that, this is in a music business, the book business to any business that where they publish you. It’s is a contract that they’d thrown in front of you, it’s the first contract, say we want to do your book – we want – here is the contract, they give you a dummy contract which a contract for idiots who’ve never done a book or anything before and they usually sign it. And dummy contract of course is called a dummy contract because only a dummy signs it. Anybody with an experience who has a lawyer working with them will say, no we can’t sign this and they have all this different changes, and of course when you do the big shocker, the big surprise you discover when you are working with publishers or anybody who throws a dummy contract out at you, is a first thing they do is they don’t even flinch when you say no we can’t do this, we can’t do that, we can’t do this, this is different, this should be this, this should be that, they go oh okay, yeah okay, okay, okay. And they just – and make all the changes almost like without argument unless you do something really crazy. But generally speaking there is – they know what the leeway is and you get – you get the deal you should get.

John C. Dvorak
No, that's not necessary, I don’t want to ask who your agent is, but there is at least one agent I know of who is really popular with the publishers because he has his writers sign the dummy contract.

Dwight Silverman
This is a she, so no.

Leo Laporte
I’ll tell you I never had an agent…

John C. Dvorak
[ph] It’s probably not a him (42:58).

Leo Laporte
I had – I signed every dummy contract they put in front of me, as a result made absolutely – I made money on the first book and made no money on the rest of the books. And I’m proud of that. I’m proud of that. And so you can never…

John C. Dvorak
Well one of the problems that you probably ran into Leo which is one of their classic tricks which I think every new author gets suckered into, is called cross-collateralization which you got to get out of the contract almost immediately. And cross-collateralization is where they give you – they give you a big advance on the first book and they say we are going to do a three-book deal.

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

John C. Dvorak
And then they say, you know, here is your money for the first book, and then we’ll give you some for the second and third book, but they’ve got this cross-collateralization thing and then so in other words if your first book doesn’t pay out, which it won’t, they take the royalties from your second book and attribute it to the first contract…

Leo Laporte
Oh boy.

John C. Dvorak
And put you in the hole and by – and then they take the third book, and it goes in there until you make up all this money that was squandered on the first book. And you just write basically three books and you get whatever you got for the first book, and that’s it. And the whole thing is just a scam.

Leo Laporte
I got an idea John. You should write a book called “Dummy Contracts for Dummies”.

John C. Dvorak
I wander if he’s sign a dummy contract to get that book published. So anyway…

Leo Laporte
Hey, I want – okay, go ahead.

John C. Dvorak
There is good stuff in this dummy contract. I mean this one is one of this – it’s very [ph] owneress (44:24). For example Untied States book sales 10% of – there were terms there - if you ever get and Dwight knows is when you get to your publisher statement they send you a – this computer printout that nobody can decipher.

Dwight Silverman
I have no idea what it says, yeah.

John C. Dvorak
United States book sales 10% which is low of actual net, which is ridiculous, receipts by publisher, except for special sales as specified below, which is actually giving you less money than this. So in other words they’re giving you – they are not even giving you 10% of the covered price or 10% of wholesale, they are giving you 10% of net.

Leo Laporte
Oh, that’s terrible.

John C. Dvorak
Which is net – actual net which is god knows what that even means.

Leo Laporte
Right.

John C. Dvorak
Which means you get nothing. You probably get – for a 10 buck book, you probably get like a nickel. But this is a classic. This dummy contract’s one of the best in terms of for dummies.

Leo Laporte
He saved it all these years.

John C. Dvorak
Well, I’ve got a bunch of this, but this was actually quite good. I may reproduce it

Leo Laporte
This is from – do you want to say who it’s from?

John C. Dvorak
It’s [ph] Sidebecks (45:27).

Leo Laporte
[ph] Sidebecks (45:28)

John C. Dvorak
[ph] Sidebecks (45:29) doesn’t, they’re – but this is like any other dummy contract. If you would want to deal with [ph] Sidebecks (45:33), you wouldn’t sign this contract, but they take it to an extreme. I mean if you’re going to put together a dummy contract, let’s just make us see how dumb you are.

Leo Laporte
Well, I want to know what John’s shirt says but I’m not going to let you know until after we come back. So John, if you’d like to take a break, anybody else wants to take a break except for you the listeners. You must stay here while I tell you about GoToMeeting. GoToMeeting is that great service from Citrix that lets you meet online – what are you laughing at? Lets you meet online, anywhere you want. So you don’t have to go travel all across town or even across the country to get those meetings go on. You can just sit where you are, wear your jammies even if you want, make a conference call but a conference call that is every bit as good as in in-person meeting. You’ll do more, you’ll travel less. You won’t have to jump in your car and drive two hours for a one-hour meeting. No one has the time for that. All you do is you go to Go – you can do it right now. Go to gotomeeting.com/twit. You’ll have it installed before I’m done talking. gotomeeting.com/twit. Sign up. You get 30 days absolutely free. Now have your first meeting. Take a minute to download the software and you’re ready to have your first meeting. You can send an email out. It integrates with Outlook, so it’s very easy to have it, send out invitations, or you can even just be on the phone with somebody. You got – by the way has built-in free VoIP and free teleconferencing. Part – that’s part of the deal. So you are on the phone. You’re talking to somebody, say, I like to show you this drawing or slide or PowerPoint or spreadsheet, whatever it is you have got on your desktop.

Go to gotomeeting.com. Click the “Join the Meeting” button. Here’s the meeting ID. You give that nine digit number and boom, they are in. And they’re seeing your screen. They are seeing what you are showing them. You can – they can say hey, look at this. Let me show you my screen and they show you your screen. You can collaborate together. You can say well, okay, what do you think of this paragraph? No, no, no, you should do this. You can even do product training. If you’ve got the product on your system, you can let them use it remotely using GoToMeeting. Why spend hundreds of dollars on plane tickets, thousands of dollars on travel. Even 50 bucks to get across town when for $49 a month you can have all the meetings you want and free voice-over-IP and phone conferencing. Sign up today for that 30-day free trial, gotomeeting.com/twit, gotomeeting.com/twit.

We use it in a lot of different ways. I have many accounts now. We use it on some of our podcasts. We certainly use it for all of our teleconferencing. I think you’re going to love it, gotomeeting.com/twit. We thank them so much for their support of this Week in Tech. So what does your T-shirt say? Oh, John is gone.

Dwight Silverman
He took you at your word.

Leo Laporte
There’s the empty chair. Look at that. Oh, here he comes, he is coming back. What is that behind his chair there? Now if you aren’t listening this, you are missing a pretty unusual thing which is – we still video of this show. You can watch it at live.twit.tv every Sunday at 6 p.m. Eastern, 3 p.m. Pacific which, if I am correct, is 20, I think 2,200 UTC live.twit.tv. And so we get these guys to get their, oh we’ve got a glass of wine, look at that.

John C. Dvorak
Oh, Happy Armistice Day.

Leo Laporte
Happy Armistice Day. Is it Armistice Day? Oh, would you look at that. What’s that behind you? Is that a shop vac behind you?

John C. Dvorak
A shop vac?

Leo Laporte
Yes, what’s that behind you? It looks like a shop vac.

John C. Dvorak
Let me see, hold on, let me look at your picture.

Leo Laporte
He doesn’t know. You can’t really see. Now you are blocking it with…

Dwight Silverman
It’s kind of the orange thing down under your left shoulder

Leo Laporte
But wait a minute. Now there’s something about that – the background.

Dwight Silverman
That shape.

Leo Laporte
That shape. It looks like a flow chart or sort of diagram.

John C. Dvorak
It says geek. It’s from – it’s an Intel shirt.

Leo Laporte
I like that. Have you seen – I love those Intel ads where they highlight like the inventor of USB….

Nicole Lee
Yeah.

Leo Laporte
And it’s like a rock star.

Nicole Lee
And they cheer him on

Leo Laporte
I love those ads. Makes me proud to be a geek.

John C. Dvorak
Personally I thought that ad was kind of creepy.

Leo Laporte
Really? They haven’t done any others. They did the one I think.

Nicole Lee
That’s all I can remember.

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

John C. Dvorak
That guy looked a little too much like Vivek Kundra.

Leo Laporte
You still got that thing for Vivek, huh? Let me see if I can find it…

John C. Dvorak
I love the guy.

Leo Laporte
Something like our rock stars aren’t anything like your rock stars or something like that, and all the women are like going crazy over him.

John C. Dvorak
Here we go.

Leo Laporte
I love the music too. He does look like Vivek Kundra. Here he comes. Oh, oh, the women are going wild.
Ajay Bhatt, co-inventor of USB.

John C. Dvorak
The thing is you don’t – what you don’t really get to see is – the bottom of his pants are off.

[Advertise] Our rock stars aren’t like your rock stars. We are Intel.

Leo Laporte
But do you know what I really like, and actually I watch this ad every time is that chorus going bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. I love that part because they’re – watch, they are looking at each other, they’re just kind of talking.

[Advertise] We are Intel.

And then all of a sudden they just start singing.

[Advertise] Sponsors of tomorrow.

Don’t you think?

John C. Dvorak
Yeah, that’s the way it is over at Intel. When you go to the Santa Clara offices, that’s exactly what it’s like.

Leo Laporte
[Indiscernible] (51:25) Dell. So actually that raised an issue. What was I going to– I can’t remember now.

John C. Dvorak
What?

Leo Laporte
You said something that made me think of something. Now I can’t remember…

John C. Dvorak
It was a, it was a…

Leo Laporte
Another story. Well, I can talk about…

Dwight Silverman
I think I might raise a story, Leo?

Leo Laporte
Yeah, you got a story for us?

Dwight Silverman
Yeah, the Apple finally – rather AT&T finally saying that we’re going to do MMS on the iPhone.

Leo Laporte
Is that big news like somebody wrote…

Dwight Silverman
It’s big news. It’s big news for iPhone owners, for every other like for owners of the Razor.

Leo Laporte
What?

Dwight Silverman
It’s not a big deal.

Leo Laporte
Somebody wrote welcome to 2006. It’s like a big deal. Well, you cover cell phones at CNET. I mean how important is it? I don’t even understand what is that that I can’t do because I don’t have MMS?

Nicole Lee
Well, a lot of phones don’t get email and that’s one of the primary ways to send pictures and video. You send it to your mom’s cell phone who doesn’t have email in her phone. And you can send her messages, multimedia messages of your grand kids or whatever and then it’s really easy. Send it to a phone number instead of an email address essentially.

Leo Laporte
Right. So if somebody sends me an MMS on my iPhone now, will I not get it?

Nicole Lee
No, you will get a link to a webpage where the...

Leo Laporte
Oh, I have seen that. I hate that. It’s a pain in the butt.

Nicole Lee
It’s a big pain.

Leo Laporte
So now I will just so – and vice versa, if somebody – if mom has a Razor, actually my wife has some – non-smartphone.

Nicole Lee
Right, and if they send you an MMS and then…

Leo Laporte
She has never taken a picture on that phone, not once.

John C. Dvorak
And by the way, Leo, it’s now called a feature phone.

Leo Laporte
Oh, oh.

Nicole Lee
A feature phone.

Leo Laporte
A dumb phone is a feature phone?

John C. Dvorak
Yeah.

Nicole Lee
No, if it’s – it’s in between a smartphone and a…

John C. Dvorak
It’s nowhere between. They are calling everything a feature phone except the phones that don’t actually exist...

Leo Laporte
So if the phone…

John C. Dvorak
What’s interesting is a phone that's just a phone anymore. They all have little features.

Nicole Lee
Sure.

Leo Laporte
But it’s features are short of being smart.

Nicole Lee
Right.

John C. Dvorak
Yeah, it’s just like plays a couple of games, it has a camera.

Nicole Lee
The MP3 or – I don’t know, the Samsung Instinct or something.

Leo Laporte
The Instinct’s a smartphone, isn’t it? Wouldn’t you call it a smartphone? I don’t like it.

Dwight Silverman
The LG Dare.

Nicole Lee
LG Dare, yeah.

Leo Laporte
Dare. There’s a good example.

Nicole Lee
It’s not a smartphone. It doesn’t run like very good email I think.

Leo Laporte
So it has to have a – what does it have to have to make it smart?

Nicole Lee
I think it has to have third party operating system like Windows Mobile or the OS, iPhone OS.

Dwight Silverman
Symbian.

Nicole Lee
Symbian. Right. One of those advanced operating systems like BlackBerry.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, [ph] oops that is gone (54:00) again.

Dwight Silverman
The interesting thing about this though is that AT&T delayed it, they promised it at the end of summer and they are doing it, actually the date falls in early fall.

Leo Laporte
I thought their explanation was pretty good. In fact – and I put a link to it in our list – there’s something to be said for the fact that poor – oh boy, I never thought I’d say poor AT&T.

John C. Dvorak
Poor AT&T.

Leo Laporte
Poor AT&T. I have got a new book coming out by the way. AT&T for Dummies. No, poor AT&T didn’t know what it was biting off when it got the iPhone. Yeah, the iPhone’s been fantastic for AT&T.

Nicole Lee
Right.

Leo Laporte
Tens of million – how many million? 10 million more...

Nicole Lee
Oh a lot yeah.

Leo Laporte
…phones have been sold. A third of all new iPhone orders are new to AT&T. So it’s been a boom for them getting new owners. But what they didn’t…

John C. Dvorak
They have more people that hate them now.

Nicole Lee
That’s true too.

Leo Laporte
What they underestimated is that iPhone users, and I’m one of them, do way more with our phones in terms of sending pictures, sending videos. I mean we are using a bandwidth like nobody’s business. And so AT&T I think was taken off guard a little bit by this and they have been upgrading the network. They said, look, we didn’t want to release MMS until we could support it but we know that you iPhone people are going to send pictures like crazy. So we had to upgrade, I think– am I crazy? But I think that in their defense that kind of makes sense.

Nicole Lee
No, I disagree because I think – I mean if you can have MMS on a regular like a Razor like you said, why, every other smartphone on the market has MMS from the get-go. Why do we have to wait three years?

Leo Laporte
Because we use so much more bandwidth.

Dwight Silverman
iPhone users use a lot more…

John C. Dvorak
Yeah, but why – yeah, but they wouldn’t have known that at the beginning, what she is saying from the get-go.

Leo Laporte
They knew that. No, they didn’t know that last year…

Nicole Lee
Okay.

Leo Laporte
But the iPhone couldn’t do MMS last year. Could only start doing MMS with the 3GS. It wasn’t even capable of it until...

Nicole Lee
Yeah, why was that? Why is that?

Leo Laporte
Because Apple didn’t build – I’ll tell you why that is. Because Steve Jobs said, what are you talking? We gave you email. What do you want MMS for? Steve didn’t get it. So only the 3GS did MMS. At that point when Apple goes to AT&T, it says we’re going to put MMS in the thing. AT&T says we’re already choking and everybody in San Francisco bitches about AT&T because there are more iPhone users per square inch in San Francisco than anywhere else.

Nicole Lee
It’s just really funny when they had that announcement at WWDC, and when they had the list of carriers up on the screen, you could see Vodafone on there, you could see like Orange U.K. on there, but you couldn’t see AT&T and there was a collective gasp of horror.

Leo Laporte
Yeah. And booing.

Nicole Lee
So all the developers where like, what?

Leo Laporte
Yeah, they said what. Even your U.S. carrier is not going to do this?

John C. Dvorak
So I think that you are probably right, Leo.

Leo Laporte
Wow! Wow! Wait a minute…

John C. Dvorak
Normally I come up with some alternative theory.

Leo Laporte
I hope I’m recording this. We’re recording this, yeah.

John C. Dvorak
I usually have an alternative theory that’s a little more interesting but I can’t argue with you, here you’re probably exactly right their sequence makes nothing but sense.

Leo Laporte
They just – I mean I kind of feel sorry for them.

John C. Dvorak
But you don’t have to milk it now.

Leo Laporte
Okay, I’m done.

John C. Dvorak
You win.

Dwight Silverman
Houston – here in Houston AT&T announced last week that they spent $30 million to upgrade the network here alone. They doubled the backhaul capacity and they added the 850 megahertz spectrum and they tied it to the MMS. I mean they essentially said that this will help with that issue. And MMS is like SMS. It works on the control channel, right?

Leo Laporte
Oh.

Dwight Silverman
It doesn’t actually use…

Leo Laporte
It’s not data.

Nicole Lee
It doesn’t use data. It uses the text messaging plan. Whatever you signed up like a 200 plan or…

Leo Laporte
Oh, that’s interesting.

Dwight Silverman
It doesn’t actually use the data network per se, so if their…

Nicole Lee
Well, it does but they don’t list it that way. They don’t bill you that way. I think...

Dwight Silverman
So here’s a question. If it actually does – it uses a separate control channel, if you go look up how SMS works and how MMS works it uses a different network from the 3G…

Leo Laporte
That’s because these technologies are older.

Nicole Lee
Yes exactly. Yes

Leo Laporte
SMS and MMS are older than data itself than GPRS. So they had to do something that a regular phone and a regular cell network could send this data, is that it Dwight?

Dwight Silverman
Yes, and here’s a question. If you instead now have the option to use a different data stream for sending a picture, you’re not going to use email, you’re going to use MMS, could it possibly take a load off of AT&T’s 3G network?

Nicole Lee
Maybe

Dwight Silverman
Could it end up distributing the data so that it’s not so choked?

Leo Laporte
But they probably had to upgrade this control channel because this control channel never was designed with this kind of traffic in mind.

Dwight Silverman
Right.

Leo Laporte
Right?

John C. Dvorak
Well, on this topic, can we try to get – does anybody there want to just make a short, some short predictions about Steve Jobs on the September 9 announcement, whether he’s going to be there, and what the announcement might be? I think we speculated on this last week.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, so September 9th Wednesday, Apple will be at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts which they’ve used before for iPod launches. It’s a very niece spot. The event email that was sent out, the invitation which I didn’t get but others. Did you get one, Nicole?

Leo Laporte
So anyway this invite which I didn’t get but I notice [ph] engadget (59:46) got so I went to [ph] engadget’s (59:48) page. Has a woman dancing around a typical iPod ad fashion, silhouette with the white headphones, and it says it’s still rock-and-roll to me, I think.

Nicole Lee
Only rock-and-roll or something.

Leo Laporte
Which by the way is a Rolling Stones lyric. I thought 9/9/09 was all about the Beatles.

Nicole Lee
Beatles, oh.

Leo Laporte
So anyway, we know it’s going to be it, it’s going to be an iPod announcement. Our prediction, no way Steve Jobs shows up for an iPod announcement.

John C. Dvorak
I agree.

Leo Laporte
You agree, Nicole? You are nodding your head.

Nicole Lee
I agree but I would be a little disappointed I think. I think because we are all waiting to see Steve Jobs show up.

Leo Laporte
I am not. I wasn’t invited. I’m going to be sitting outside, saying hey, did Steve show up. Hey, were you in there? Was Steve Jobs in there?

Nicole Lee
I do agree though that there are saving Steve for the yet unknown…

Leo Laporte
Tabloid.

Nicole Lee
…tabloid announcement.

John C. Dvorak
Maybe, maybe not. Here’s one of the things that they have to concern themselves with. Unless Steve bulks up a little bit, Steve himself will distract from the announcement.

Nicole Lee
That’s true.

John C. Dvorak
Because all you are going to get is speculation about his health again.

Leo Laporte
So he may not want to even show up at the tabloid announcement.

John C. Dvorak
Unless he bulks up, I mean, maybe they could shoot him up with something that makes him kind of chubby for a day or two and he goes in there and come on there and…

Leo Laporte
Pump it up.

John C. Dvorak
Something could happen….it’s possible.

Nicole Lee
Because they want the headlines to read Steve Jobs is healthy and well and working on this new tabloid from Apple.

John C. Dvorak
Of coursethat would probably invite even more – whatever Steve did, because he has been away so long. Even if he comes back looking great, it’s going to create a whole another buzz about Steve.

Leo Laporte
You are absolutely right. If you’re smart you show up as Steve Jobs at somebody else’s event. You show up at the Windows 7 launch and steal the thunder from Windows 7. He can come to my house party. Steve, Steve you are invited, come to my house party. We will serve chopped liver. We will serve liver pate, no wait a minute, that’s bad.

John C. Dvorak
No, no he won’t eat liver. No wait a minute, what kind of a joke is that?

Leo Laporte
It’s awful, that was awful.

Nicole Lee
That was a low blow.

Leo Laporte
Who told, that was terrible. No he is a vegetarian. We will serve all vegan.

John C. Dvorak
He is a vegan, let’s get it right.

Leo Laporte
He is from Vegas. We will serve all Vegas food all the time.

John C. Dvorak
Which is mostly shrimp from what I can tell.

Leo Laporte
Really, vegan is not shrimp. Shrimp has a face. Oh, Vegas is shrimp, yeah.

Nicole Lee
Okay.

Leo Laporte
Vegas is shrimp and beef. So Dwight, you didn’t weigh in on this. Will Jobs show up?

Dwight Silverman
Well I think that – I don’t think he will but with one caveat – this is kind of a – in terms of Apple’s products it’s a light event, it’s not a Mac, it’s not the tabloid, it’s not the iPhone and maybe if they like don’t want to stress him out too much. They might bring him out for this reason or possibly, right this will be easy.

Leo Laporte
All right, I am going to ask the chat room, this is our famous chat room poll where the chat room gets to tell us yes or no. Will Steve Job show up on 9/9/09 for the big, what we presume is an iPod announcement.

John C. Dvorak
And what you mean by show up. He is going to show up on the stage.

Leo Laporte
Now here’s an interesting 42, somebody said 42. Don’t care is another one. Now here’s an interesting question. If there is a chance he would show up if it’s a Beatles announcement and Ringo and Paul show up.

Nicole Lee
Will they?

John C. Dvorak
Well I think Paul is a vegan.

Leo Laporte
That’s right, he doesn’t eat anything with a face either.

John C. Dvorak
So, that’s an interesting speculation.

Leo Laporte
Okay, so this is my speculation. This is it 9/9/09 Beatles right? Number 9, number 9. It’s the day the Beatles rock band comes out. It’s the day that mono-remixes of the Beatles CDs come out.

John C. Dvorak
It is Beatles iPod.

Leo Laporte
Well if the Beatles which have never been available on digital download, what if Apple says we have an exclusive digital download exclusive on iTunes through the rest of the year. The only place you will be able to digital download these remixes of the Beatles stuff, and ladies and gentlemen, to tell us all about it, Paul and Ringo and Steve, the fourth Beatle.

Nicole Lee
The fourth Beatle.

Dwight Silverman
Well I think that Just about a month ago, didn’t a month ago, didn’t we, didn’t the Beatles say that the negotiations for digital rights are still ongoing?

Leo Laporte
They were ongoing.

Dwight Silverman
Yeah, so I don’t think, I think that that was a signal that it’s not going to happen.

Leo Laporte
It’s not going happen.

John C. Dvorak
No, no, no that was a red herring.

Leo Laporte
Why would you not, what negotiations, for crying out loud, release the damn things…

John C. Dvorak
[ph] Everybody is downloading in (74:41) fact they haven’t announced it yet, you can say they are ongoing when in fact there has been a done deal, but it hasn’t been announced. So it’s still something is still ongoing. I think it is just weasel words.

Leo Laporte
John, not John didn’t show up anywhere. Paul and Ringo showed up at a Microsoft event at E3 remember to announce Beatles rock band. So it’s not unheard that if Microsoft can afford them that he might show up at another event. They might show up at another event.

Nicole Lee
Well, the question is whether…

John C. Dvorak
And they’ll probably work cheaper for Apple.

Nicole Lee
Well the question is whether they are going to even release the Beatles digitally right.

Leo Laporte
Right, that’s what we were saying is that that deal has not…

John C. Dvorak
I have it on pretty good authority that the Beatles stuff is going to come out.

Leo Laporte
I think it’s got to be the case. And now, if you are Steve Jobs, you want to show up for that and…

John C. Dvorak
You are right, if Paul McCartney and Ringo and maybe the Lennons.

Leo Laporte
He loves the Beatles. And Yoko, what if Yoko shows?

John C. Dvorak
Well then it’s, there you go Steve’s got to marry her.

Leo Laporte
If Yoko shows, I am not going. That’s why they didn’t invite me because Yoko was going to be there. I would then be really hurt if that I didn’t get invited if the Beatles…

John C. Dvorak
There you go.

Nicole Lee
If the Beatles showed up.

Leo Laporte
Remaining Beatles showed up, I would – I am now going to be hurt.

Nicole Lee
Yeah, although would they show up at Yerba Buena Center for the arts - it is a smaller venue.

Leo Laporte
They showed up at E freaking Three, talk about a small venue – it was in an aircraft hangar. Here is my theory. I think this has taken off, was it John who said this that Steve does not want to make his appearance be the story. He is not going to…

Nicole Lee
That could be it.

Leo Laporte
He is going to have to show up somewhere where it’s not, it doesn’t matter if his health overshadows the story. The iPod’s absolutely are that kind of announcement, aren’t they?

Nicole Lee
The announcement has to be big enough to overshadow it I guess. It has to be a big enough announcement.

Leo Laporte
Well it won’t overshadow, but it’s not the end of the world even if it does, right. So what it’s a new iPod, big deal but that’s not a big story.

John C. Dvorak
If Steve could get a hold, remember the Talking Heads in that one video they did where they wore that big giant suit.

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

John C. Dvorak
If Steve could get a hold of that thing.

Dwight Silverman
The stop making sense suit.

John C. Dvorak
Yeah You’d have something.

Dwight Silverman
That’s bulking up.

Nicole Lee
That’s true.

Leo Laporte
No, that makes anybody look skinny. If I would look like I was dying in that suit, the giant suit. Let me see if I can find that. I think it’s here.

[Music] (1:07:08)

John C. Dvorak
There it is.

Leo Laporte
It does not look like giant.

John C. Dvorak
That’s not it - it’s a big giant suit. I think it’s huge.

Leo Laporte
Maybe [indiscernible] (67:21) wasn’t wearing the suit.

John C. Dvorak
That’s a giant suit for the [indiscernible] (1:07:23).

Leo Laporte
What am I going to get if I even search for a giant suit? What kind of weird stuff am I going to get? Giant suit. Let me look giant suit. I will do talking, oh no, David Burn giant suit, right. David Burn giant…

John C. Dvorak
Just hope that people tag things properly.

Leo Laporte
Just pray, here it is. Giant Japanese armored [ph] Mac (1:07:48), no nothing, I get nothing.

John C. Dvorak
Well somebody within those chat rooms must have a link to it.

Leo Laporte
Yeah I am sure they will send us something, it has to be from the concert right because that’s where he, no it was the movie. It was in the movie.Cares. I am done, I am over it now.

John C. Dvorak
We are done, what’s the next story?

Leo Laporte
What’s the next story, moving on.

Nicole Lee
Moving on.

Leo Laporte
Moving on. Let’s see, did I mention that Microsoft’s going to be able to sell Microsoft Word now.

John C. Dvorak
Yeah, you did. You mentioned that, let’s see - one, two, three, four times so far.

Leo Laporte
Spiderman is now a Disney property.

Nicole Lee
Yes.

John C. Dvorak
Does anybody but me, can I maybe do a little editorializing here?

Leo Laporte
Yes.

John C. Dvorak
So, Disney used to be the family-friendly and all those other kind of thing and then some years ago they changed Tomorrowland from kind of a looking forward, kind of a cool place where the Monsanto House of the Future which today will be some sort of roundup thing and then kind of a bright cherry future, then they changed it in the Disneyland in Anaheim to this kind of grim kind of dysfunctional-looking, dystopia kind of creepy based on things like Mad Max, that kind of grim future and now instead of these happy characters which you all have been used to seeing, the dwarfs running around and the crazy mad hatter and all that stuff, now we have got these incredibly creepy adult cartoon characters…

Leo Laporte
Wait a minute.

John C. Dvorak
Which basically would scare little kids.

Leo Laporte
Spiderman?

John C. Dvorak
No Spiderman, Spiderman’s kind of creepy, but the rest of them – the big, these are not things that little kids are going to warm up to - they’re not warm – it’s not Bambi we are talking about.

Dwight Silverman
Leo, Leo, two words.

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

Dwight Silverman
Mickey Hulk.

Leo Laporte
He is green.

Nicole Lee
But doesn’t Disney own Miramax and like Pixar, I mean Miramax is fairly adult as you know.

Leo Laporte
That’s true.

Nicole Lee
Pixar is not adult per se but it has pretty good contents, not necessarily just for kids.

Leo Laporte
But how much movie do these, how much money do these Marvel movies make - they are doing very, very well I think?

Nicole Lee
That’s true, well what do they make? The X-Men movies.

Leo Laporte
X-Men…

Nicole Lee

Hulk….

Leo Laporte
Spiderman

John C. Dvorak
Hulk, Wolverine.

Nicole Lee
Wolverine – that’s true.

Leo Laporte
All of these are doing really, really well I think. I don’t know if $4 billion well, but that’s what, I mean Disney is a movie company nowadays it really if you think about Pixar, Miramax Disney, has really become a movie company and if you are movie company owning the rights to all those Marvel characters, we seem to have an insatiable appetite for superhero movies.

Leo Laporte
Giant suit, now if Steve Jobs had that giant suit, how could he, he could easily come out on the stage. What it does though is make your head look really small.

Nicole Lee
It does.

Dwight Silverman
David Burns head is really small.

Leo Laporte
Well there you go. That suit is actually normal, normally sized suit and he is a tiny, tiny person.

Dwight Silverman
And still [indiscernible] (1:11:05).

Leo Laporte
I don’t know, I don’t know he is getting interviewed by somebody very strange and this, I don’t know where this video came from but there he is in the giant suit, so. Wait a minute the person’s changed, I don’t, this is, this must be from somebody.

John C. Dvorak
What are you watching?

Leo Laporte
I don’t know. This is a link, this is a link sent to me by the chat room. These people have strange taste.

Nicole Lee
According to fun crunch in the chat room, she says that David Burns designed this suit because he has a big head - to make it look smaller.

Leo Laporte
Oh, see, see.

John C. Dvorak
It’s counter-intuitive.

Leo Laporte
Oh, that was him introducing, interviewing himself that’s he was all of those characters. Oh that’s creepy.

All right, let’s take a break, come back with more, you are listening to This Week in Tech with Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle, the chronicle tech blog is a must read at blogs.chron.com/techblog. Nicole Lee from CNET she is their expert on cell phones and her blog is neekole. Spelt funny. Ni – is it n – spell it for me.

Nicole Lee
N-e-e-k-o-l-e.com

Leo Laporte
See even I spelled it wrong, neekole.com.

Nicole Lee
It’s a personal blog, so there is nothing really exciting on there.

Leo Laporte
Where would you like people to go to find out more about…?

Nicole Lee
Yeah, so I do, we do a cell phone podcast on CNET as well. I am on that.

Leo Laporte
Tell me about that, where is that?

Nicole Lee
Yeah, it’s at dialedin.cnet.com.

Leo Laporte
That’s the name of it.

Nicole Lee
Yeah, dialedin.cnet.com.

Leo Laporte
I will use that from now on for your lower third, we will use that.

Nicole Lee
Yeah.

Leo Laporte
And then of course John C. Dvorak at channeldvorak.com. He has so many podcasts he only – he only really – let’s go to that website.

John C. Dvorak
Channeldvorak.com works.

Leo Laporte
And that’s the place to go. Any of you, are any of you into audio books at all? Gosh you ought to be, you are missing such, how can I get you to, maybe if I had free offer or something, maybe if I could give you free two free audio books that would be sufficient to get you to check out audible.com/twit2. That gives you the access to the platinum account. The platinum account is two books a month which is what I use because I go through two books a month easy. And if you do that, you get the first two free and you get to keep them even if you don’t stick around. So this is fun, although it becomes a challenge because now you got to pick two books and there’s so, man you just go to audible.com with 60,000 choices and it’s hard not to just go crazy on here - Stephen King, Dan Brown, Nora Roberts, Dean Koontz, just a huge amount.

This is great, they have added some social features the most popular books on your fellow listener’s wish lists, John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, Pat Conroy’s South of Broad, Jerry Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s - we’ve got to get Jerry on this show again, he hasn’t been on in ages. The book he wrote with Larry Niven top five wish list books. There is a bunch of a great sci-fi now on Audible. Thanks to the Audible Frontiers program including Lucifer’s Hammer which is new. They’ve just added that and another Jerry Pournelle.

John C. Dvorak
That’s a great book.

Leo Laporte
Isn’t that great?

John C. Dvorak
That’s an awesome book.

Leo Laporte
If you have never listened, look at this the sci-fi stuff is just fantastic, audible.com/twit2 that’s the place to go whether it’s business, classics, fiction and non-fiction whatever you are interested in listening to, you are going to find it at audible.com. I want to put – I’ll tell you what I am going to put Lucifer’s Hammer. See I have got two books, two credits right here. Put Lucifer’s Hammer in there because I want to listen to that, that’s a long one too, that’s 24 hours. I like long books, that’s one in there and you can figure out what the other one is. We will make that our recommendation. Maybe The Mote in God’s Eye - another great Jerry Pournelle.

Dwight Silverman
Oh, yeah.

Leo Laporte
I didn’t know you were a Jerry Pournelle fan Dwight, We will get you on with Jerry because he’s just…

Dwight Silverman
Oh, that’d be great, I love Jerry.

Leo Laporte
I grew up, I mean grew up, I was an adult but I mean Right Byte’s Magazine’s [indiscernible] (1:15:19) he wrote for years was really what got me into computers.

Dwight Silverman
I love it when he kind of blusters into the press room at CES, he’s the presence.

Leo Laporte
Well, we’ll get them on and I’ll get you back on in there – we’ll do an old timer show

Leo Laporte
I’ll get you some napkins; I am so excited about that house party, it’s going to be so much fun. We’ll set up a date for that. Meanwhile get your Audible account right now, The Mote in God’s Eye is our pick and Lucifer’s Hammer, two great Jerry Pournelle classics with Larry Niven, audible.com/twit2. Your first two books are free when you go to that URL and if you haven’t started listening to audio books just start, just do me a favor. Just start, you’ll thank me later and I’ll let get e-mail every single day from somebody said - I heard the audible ad, I finally broke down, I’ve been hearing it for a long time and I cannot thank you enough. It just saves your life - long airplane flight, long commute, stuck in traffic at the Bay Bridge waiting, waiting for four days for them to fix it, audible. You won’t even mind, audible.com/twit2, we thank them for their support of This Week in Tech.

Let’s see, I had another story.

John C. Dvorak
So are you loosing weight Leo?

Leo Laporte
No, no I am just wasting, wasting away. Why do I look thinner, do you think I look thinner, do you think I look good?

John C. Dvorak
Yeah.

Leo Laporte
It’s – maybe, I don’t know, I don’t think I am actually losing weight, I just think I am getting old. You know how you get old and drawn and everything starts to…

John C. Dvorak
I have heard of it.

Nicole Lee
I think you have lost a little weight.

Leo Laporte
You think so.

Nicole Lee
Yeah.

Leo Laporte
Oh gosh, I am liking this show. We are going to have you guys back. So, I know what I was thinking of– you were talking about an anniversary or a date. There is a debate and I am very curious what you guys think about, some media outlets were saying, in fact my wife came to me on Wednesday, she said you know it’s the 40th anniversary of the Internet. I said what?

John C. Dvorak
Yeah, that’s a good story.

Nicole Lee
Yeah.

Leo Laporte
How did I miss that? Well it isn’t, that’s how I missed it.

John C. Dvorak
That is why you didn’t missed it.

Leo Laporte
It isn’t. For some reason, I guess because Symantec did a press release or something, media outlets have decided September 2nd is the 40th anniversary the day the Internet was invented, in fact not even close. Leonard Kleinrock who ought to know better says that on his site it was October 29, 1969, when that famous first message was transmitted to SRI – from two computers in SRI in Menlo Park.

John C. Dvorak
Yeah, but wait.

Leo Laporte
But wait there’s more.

John C. Dvorak
But wait.

Nicole Lee
But wait.

John C. Dvorak
That was the first use of what was already in place.

Leo Laporte
ARPANET.

John C. Dvorak
Which had to be in place before that message was sent and before it was in place, it had to have been conceived and invented, thus the Internet itself in terms of its, the way – the way it was conceived is that the, should you base– it’s like being born – if you’re being born, your birthday is not when you first started crying or when you say mom; it is when you were born is that really the date of the Internet’s birth, I think we should be celebrating.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, what do you know, I mean, come on now, let’s not get in that debate.

John C. Dvorak
What other the debate that we’re going to get in?

Leo Laporte
Concept, the Internet was conceived. On Kleinrock’s website, there he says that they were using ARPANET and – do you consider ARPANET the birth of the Internet because ARPANET’s even older.

John C. Dvorak
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Nicole Lee
Yes, absolutely.

Dwight Silverman
But did ARPANET use a tcprp which is a protocol for the Internet. I am talking about tcprp.

Leo Laporte
He says on September 2, 1969, his team exchanged meaningless data over the ARPANET.

Nicole Lee
Nothing has changed.

John C. Dvorak
It’s just like you do today.

Leo Laporte
We send a Viagra ad.

Dwight Silverman
Youtube, it’s Youtube.

Nicole Lee
It’s been 40 years, nothing has changed.

Leo Laporte
Meaningless date - oh it’s a Twitter account, the first Twitter. I had pancakes for breakfast. But on October 29th they sent an actual message. Why did it take so long, I mean that’s two months later practically?

John C. Dvorak
They didn’t know what to say.

Leo Laporte
He says...

John C. Dvorak
The guy was standing right across the room. Hey, can I send you a message, why don’t you just tell me.

Leo Laporte
So the first message, message according to this, they were trying to log in to one computer from the other but they only got the first two letters LO and then the system crashed, so the first…

John C. Dvorak
Sounds like a – there is a joke there somewhere in the line.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, it sounds like Windows. So the first message in the Internet was LO.

Dwight Silverman
LO, Hello.

Nicole Lee
LO.

John C. Dvorak
LO.

Leo Laporte
And then we’re able to do a login an hour later. So what is the official birthday of the Internet?

John C. Dvorak
We’re going to have to do a poll, we are going to have to talk to [ph] Vince Surf (1:20:34) and all this other Internet old timers.

Leo Laporte
He’d know.

John C. Dvorak
And they’re all going to give us different dates.

Leo Laporte
You know – let’s – who is definitive on this, the Wikipedia, let’s ask, Wikipedia will know.

John C. Dvorak
Wikipedia.

Leo Laporte
They’ll know.

John C. Dvorak
Yeah that will give us a ballpark.

Leo Laporte
Okay, Wikipedia, first two [indiscernible] (80:59) that would become the ARPANET were interconnected between UCLA and SRI. UCLA of course in Los Angeles, SRI in Menlo Park, California, October 29th, 1969, that was the first connection.

Nicole Lee
So would that be the first...

Leo Laporte
It’s not the conception, johncdvorak.org/blog. It’s just the first connection, but that’s even wrong according to Kleinrock because they sent data two months earlier.

John C. Dvorak
Then we’re being scammed.

Leo Laporte
I just want to know when to get the cake, that’s all.

Dwight Silverman
I think the 29th, I’d vote for the 29th.

John C. Dvorak
I think we just do the whole year as the Internet year.

Nicole Lee
Yeah, Internet year. There you go.

Leo Laporte
It is the internet year. So this is the 40th Internet year. So we’ve got Woodstock. It’s interesting isn’t it? Woodstock and the Internet - the same age.

John C. Dvorak
Oh that’s in – it is an interesting coincidence.

Leo Laporte
Really.

John C. Dvorak
What else was taking place then?

Leo Laporte
1969, Richard M. Nixon was inaugurated a President in 1969.

John C. Dvorak
69, 69.

Leo Laporte
What a great year. What were you doing?

Dwight Silverman
The Manson murders.

Leo Laporte
The Manson murders, there you go. What were you doing John in 1969, where you at [indiscernible] (1:22:08) then?

John C. Dvorak
It’s kind of a blur, so long ago. Let’s just to say I’m lucky to be alive.

Leo Laporte
I would say, yeah I was in – I think I was in 8th or 9th grade in 1969.

Dwight Silverman
I was 13.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, we’re the same age, Dwight. Yeah

Dwight Silverman
Yeah.

Nicole Lee
Apollo 11 returned from the first successful moon landing.

Leo Laporte
Oh yeah because the moon landing

Nicole Lee
In 1969.

Dwight Silverman
That’s right, the moon landing.

Leo Laporte
Moon landing was in 1969

John C. Dvorak
Oh yeah. The moon, there is a lot of things that happened in ’69, who knew it was such a great year.

Leo Laporte
Do you think anybody including Kleinrock, [ph] Vince Surf (1:22:46), Bob McCabe all the people involved in this – these early days of the Internet had any idea what they were creating.

John C. Dvorak
No, of course not

Leo Laporte
No idea.

John C. Dvorak
No they were just having fun. [Indiscernible] (1:22:59).

Leo Laporte
They thought it would be a good idea. [Indiscernible] (1:23:00) was working at the Pentagon and he – his issue as I remember from, by the way Katie Hefner has a great book - Where Wizards Stay Up Late that talks about all these. You know I have that book, I should see what she says, but she talks about...

John C. Dvorak
She’d give an….

Leo Laporte
What, that…

John C. Dvorak
She’d probably give you another date?

Leo Laporte
She probably would, she probably would, but she talks about the fact that I was – I think it was [ph] Lick Lyder (1:23:26) who was in a Pentagon office and he had two computers right next to each other, they couldn’t talk to each other and he said; I’ve got to spend some money, figure a way that two different makes of computers could talk to one another. And they went to...

John C. Dvorak
And then he went to a lap link.

Nicole Lee
Oh, lap link. I had one of those.

Leo Laporte
Al Gore was not there at anytime

Nicole Lee
No.

Leo Laporte
No, I don’t know was Al was doing at the time. Big VMware conference was this week, in fact we have had a couple of visitors who were there at the VMware conference and it’s interesting because on one hand The New York Times says that VMware is maybe Microsoft’s top rival after Google. On the other hand [ph] Paul Thorat (1:24:09) was saying boy, I mean this a company that just that the lights are out, they just haven’t realized it yet – it often happens in technology that...

John C. Dvorak
Are you talking about VMware?

Leo Laporte
Yeah, he thinks that Microsoft’s Hyper-V is just going to -- [ph] steal more (1:24:21)

John C. Dvorak
Everybody, I’ve got in both sides to that argument, but most of the people I talk to that seem to be in the know, say that the VMware code is at least two to three years ahead off anything Microsoft’s doing and Microsoft’s the company that’s clueless and if history proves us correct I would take that bet.

Leo Laporte
But remember, Paul Maritz is the CEO at VMware, former Senior Executive at Microsoft who was actually the number three guy there and he also lured away another Microsoft guy, Todd Neilson, he’s the COO. What do you think Simon’s here for the VMware, he’s from London. What do you think, Simon, Microsoft or VMware, who’s going to win this one in virtualization?

Simon
At enterprise level, VMware will win. (1:25:05)

Leo Laporte
He says at enterprise level VMware all the way.

Simon
SMB market, I think they’ll lose attraction from the share there and Hyper-V will come up – (1:25:05)

Leo Laporte
SMB market, Hyper-V is going to be a good contender there. So it’s a horse race in other words, it’s a very close horse race, interesting. Okay, well now that I’ve put everybody to the sleep I think that we should –

John C. Dvorak
That would do it, yeah. VMware.

Leo Laporte
I saved that one for last so that you’d all have a good night’s sleep tonight.

John C. Dvorak
We talk / joke (1:25:34) about the intricacies of PHP next, coming right up.

Leo Laporte
Well you know, keeping them busy. He says we should do a web-design show and I keep saying Dane you know I just don’t – I don’t think the intricacies of PHP are really ready for primetime. I just can’t, I don’t –

John C. Dvorak
And to get four columns with CSS, it requires –

Leo Laporte
Exactly! I don’t think that’s going to be a good podcast.

Nicole Lee
[indiscernible] and fix it. (1:26:08)

Dwight Silverman
You could call it This Week in PHP.

John C. Dvorak
Barely a good book.

Leo Laporte
THWiPHP.

Dwight Silverman
This week – THWiP.

Leo Laporte
[Raspberry blowing sounds]. All right, Skype was sold, anybody care? eBay – here is an example of corporate malfeasance. Every time Meg Whitman came on stumping for senator McCain, I thought this is not the person you bring on to say what a great executive abilities John McCain has. This woman – I mean, look what she did with eBay; she spent $3.1 billion on Skype, and didn’t even –

John C. Dvorak
Wasn’t she gone by the time that they bought – ?

Leo Laporte
Oh, was she gone? So I won’t give her any grief.

John C. Dvorak
I think so.

Leo Laporte
Whoever did it, whoever was running eBay bought Skype for 3.1 billion and talk about dummy contract; the Skype guys who are obviously brilliant, said ‘well yeah we will sell you the company, we just won’t sell you the core technology of Skype.’

John C. Dvorak
Do it in Swedish, come on.

Leo Laporte
Come on. They are not Swedish, they are from Holland. So they said ‘we will sell…’ it’s very similar.

John C. Dvorak
Well the accent is Swedish.

Leo Laporte
‘We will sell you the core technology of Skype.’

John C. Dvorak
That’s actually pretty good.

Dwight Silverman
Yeah.

Leo Laporte
‘For three point – I tell you what…’

John C. Dvorak
For Dutch.

Leo Laporte
And the Dutch by the way.

John C. Dvorak
Cause it’s kind of got a little German in there.

Leo Laporte
It’s a little German / Scandinavian mix. I’ll tell you what; the Dutch are the best businessmen in the world I think. They are very sharp businessmen. But they invented the stock market in, like, the 1600s.

Dwight Silverman
Yeah, for tulips right, wasn’t it?

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

John C. Dvorak
And they don’t even live on any real land!

Leo Laporte
They don’t. They borrowed their land from the sea. And they still aren’t giving it back. Anyway. So the Dutch, they said to – ‘Skype, well, we could sell you Skype to eBay, we could sell you Skype, but for $5 billion you’ll get everything.’

And eBay said ‘Well, no; that’s a little high.’

‘Well for 3.1 billion we give you everything except for this little tiny bit here; this stuff – this is just code you don’t need this.’

‘Okay, we will take it! That’s a deal!’

John C. Dvorak
That’s very much the deal in a nutshell.

Leo Laporte
‘That’s the deal, man! We get everything except that a little ball of code?’

‘Yes you get everything.’

‘Okay!’

So the give them $3.1 billion. Now couple of years later the founder of Skype are saying ‘you guys are stupid, we’re not going to let you do this anymore, we’re going to get our code back. You can’t operate it without this little ball of code, and we’re taking our ball and we’re going.

And basically jeopardizing Skype ‘unless you let us buy it back.’ So they got an investment company to buy back Skype, $1.9 billion in cash, eBay keeps 35%. That values the company at $2.75 billion. So hey you know, 300 million here or there; big deal. And this investment group, which reminds me – this reminds me a lots John of when Ziff Davis was sold to Forstmann Little. These guys – these investment groups don’t want to hold it, right. They are going to pass it along, make a little money.

John C. Dvorak
Yeah, they are just jugglers.

Leo Laporte
It includes the Canadian pension plan investment report [ph] (1:29:15). Marc Andreessen’s new start up, he is the guy who wrote Netscape, Andreessen Horowitz, Silver Lake and Index Ventures; they put in that $1.9 billion in cash. I think this is preparatory, don’t you think, to passing it on to the Skype founders originally. They are going to get it back, they will get to keep 500 million, you know half a billion here or there; big deal. And now they’re happy.

Dwight Silverman
Does the presence of Anderson mean anything in this? I mean, might he do anything more interesting with it?

Leo Laporte
I don’t think so. He has such a – this is diluted amongst all these guys. Do you think he has –

Dwight Silverman
Yeah.

Leo Laporte
It’s just money for him.

John C. Dvorak
The whole thing is weird. So I ran into Meg Whitman’s campaign manager.

Leo Laporte
Oh yes; she is running for governor, isn’t she?

Nicole Lee
Yeah she is.

John C. Dvorak
Yeah. And of course she got into trouble by praising that guy who just quit the Obama administration, so they had to put out a bunch of fires about that. But they are very serious.

Leo Laporte
Really?

John C. Dvorak
I don’t think – I don’t see anybody beating Jerry Brown, but you know

Leo Laporte
Jerry – you think Jerry Brown’s going to make it as governor again?

John C. Dvorak
Yeah.

Leo Laporte
The real question is why would anybody wanted to be governor of California? It’s the worst job in the world. You have no power; everybody blames you for everything even though you can do nothing.

John C. Dvorak
Yeah, but Jerry Brown seems to relish that sort of thing. He was also the mayor of Oakland, as you recall.

Leo Laporte
Oh! Another bad job.

John C. Dvorak
Same kind of thing.

Leo Laporte
Yeah. Well he has nothing to lose. I mean he’s already – she was CEO of eBay through March 2008; I think she did preside over the –

Dwight Silverman
She did do the Skype deal.

John C. Dvorak
She did really.

Leo Laporte
Yeah. I think that was her deal, yeah.

Nicole Lee
[indiscernible] everyone says to me. (1:30:52)

John C. Dvorak
But do you have a point then?

Leo Laporte
Yeah. I mean that’s not what I would call a good executive decision. She brought the dummy contract.

Dwight Silverman
There’s the title for this episode Leo; The Dummy Contract.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, I signed the Dummy Contract.

John C. Dvorak
The Dummy Contract.

Leo Laporte
All right, kids. Hey, thanks so much for being here. Dwight Silverman you’re the greatest from the Houston Chronicle; blogs.chron.com/techblog/ is the place to go to read Dwight every single day. And his link blog, like I said, is really the source for this show. You don’t need to listen to TWiT, just read Dwight’s blog; you’re pretty much done.

Dwight Silverman
No, do listen to TWiT.

Leo Laporte
Oh all right.

Dwight Silverman
And don’t forget Leo that Microsoft now gets to sell word.

Leo Laporte
This news just in.

Dwight Silverman
Just in!

Leo Laporte
We’ll have you for our house party Dwight.

Dwight Silverman
All right.

Leo Laporte
I think we are going to have a big one. I think we might have like 20 participants. We are just going to really – we’ve got balloons for 15 and all the napkins so I think we’re set. Also don’t forget to catch Nicole Lee’s podcast, foolish me, I forgot to mention dialedin.cnet.com/ Nicole you’re great. Nicole and I worked together at TechTV and it’s just great to see you again.

Nicole Lee
Very good, I still have my TechTV badge.

Leo Laporte
Do you?

Nicole Lee
Yeah.

Leo Laporte
I turned mine in.

Nicole Lee
They didn’t ask me to.

Leo Laporte
I made the mistake of turning it in; I should have kept it; I would love to have that. That would be a great memory. Somewhere – I scanned it or took a picture of it, so somewhere on the internet a picture lives of my TechTV badge. Another former TechTVer, John C. Dvorak. Like the rest of us he has moved on to bigger and better things, you can find it all at ChannelDvorak.com. He is a geek. At least he’s got the shirt. They used to make ties, now they’re down to shirts, T-shirts? Remember those great Intel silk ties I got that they used to have?

John C. Dvorak
Yeah, Intel’s – well they have chotchkies, I mean just (1:32:45) whatever.

Leo Laporte
Chotchkies! (1:32:50) Don’t forget I’m on Bobby Llewellyn’s CarPool this week. If you want to see me drive around in a Prius and give Bobby a tour of Petaluma, my hometown, that’s at llewtube.com. Which by the way is the best looking website in history, because it’s designed to look like a 1984 Macintosh.

Nicole Lee
Oh! I love it. I love it.

Leo Laporte
Isn’t it great?

Nicole Lee
It looks so cool.

Leo Laporte
I mean, just – it’s got the waste basket and everything.

Nicole Lee
Just scroll down to show people the [ph] ad, (1:33:21) there you go.

Leo Laporte
Isn’t it great? Yeah, oh I love it. llewtube.com thank you Bobby. The only reason I’m plugging this by way is because he says ‘my god, you got more downloads than Stephen Fry!’ And I just want to like kill Stephen Fry dead. Just dead.

Nicole Lee
He still has more Twitter followers than you, you know.

Leo Laporte
Yeah. Well it’s true. Everybody has more Twitter followers. I’m number 368 on the Twitter list now. It just doesn’t even matter. You can watch this show live as I said every Saturday – sorry Sunday afternoon, 6pm Eastern, 3pm Pacific 2200 UTC at live.twit.tv. In fact we do all of our shows live. So just keep live.twit.tv on 24/7, you are sure to see something you are interested in if you are a geek. Or download it; we’ve got it on iTunes, the Zune store and everywhere else. Thank you so much for being here, we invite you to come back again next week.